I'll Be Home for Christmas

by Dawn Stewardson

  “What it seems to boil down to,” he concluded, “is that calling the police would be risky. And Wes didn’t sound like he had a lot of faith in what they’d be able to do.”

  “I think,” Ali murmured, “that I’d have been too terrified to call them, anyway, even if he’d said we should. I’d have been so scared that Bob would find out and...oh, I just don’t know what he’d do if I crossed him. Maybe take off with Robbie and never let me see him again.”

  Or maybe, Logan thought, something even worse—whether she crossed him or not.

  “So,” she said, “Wes thought the best thing to do was just go ahead and give Bob the money?”

  Logan cleared his throat. They’d reached show time and he didn’t feel up to it.

  She waited, watching him evenly.

  “Wes saw a problem with just handing over the money, too,” he said at last. “He thinks that after Bob’s gone to so much trouble to make people think he’s dead—well, Wes doesn’t figure he’ll want to leave anyone around who knows he’s really alive. Once he’s got the money...”

  Ali simply continued to gaze at Logan for a moment, then she pressed her fingers to her mouth, whispering, “Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord, you don’t really think he could be right about that, do you?”

  She’d begun to tremble, so Logan drew her close and held her. She felt so good against him that he couldn’t help wishing the circumstances were entirely different—for selfish reasons, as well as for her sake and Robbie’s. He’d like her to be in his arms because it was where she wanted to be, not simply because she needed comforting.

  He pushed those thoughts away. The circumstances weren’t different. And until they were...hell, there was no point in thinking about until, either. Because even if this all turned out just fine, he’d be on his way to L.A. in a few weeks.

  Eventually, Ali drew back and looked at him again. “We’ve been forgetting something. Bob probably wouldn’t want to leave anyone around who knows he’s really alive, but Robbie isn’t going to know. Bob said it would be better for him just to go on believing his father was dead, remember?”

  “But you’ll know,” Logan said quietly.

  “Yes...yes, I will. But once Bob has the money he’ll be in a hurry to get away from Toronto. So I don’t think I have too much to worry about. And as long as Robbie’s safe...”

  Logan didn’t want to say another word, but he forced himself to. “When it comes down to even Robbie’s safety, are you absolutely sure you can trust Bob?”

  Her eyes luminous, she murmured, “No.”

  “No,” he repeated quietly, relieved that she’d stopped trying to delude herself. “Then we can’t go merrily along with him. You can’t give him the money unless you get Robbie back first. You’ll have to—”

  “No, I’m not going to have the slightest say in the arrangements, Logan. And I know there won’t be any chance of getting Robbie back before Bob has his money. He doesn’t trust people at all, me included, so he’d never just agree to... I’d have to have some bargaining power and I don’t. I’ve been thinking and thinking, but I can’t come up with anything that might even tempt him to make a deal with me. The best I’ll be able to do is insist that Robbie is right there, waiting for me, when I hand over the money.”

  Logan sat rubbing his jaw for a minute.

  “What?” Ali finally said.

  “I just don’t like him calling all the shots. What if he has no intention of living up to his end of things? Even if you gave him the money, he could easily turn around and...”

  Logan’s words trailed off, but Ali didn’t ask him to finish the sentence. She’d gotten the message loud and clear. Once she gave Bob the money, Robbie would no longer be safe. And neither would she. Swallowing hard, determined not to cry, she whispered, “So what do we do?”

  He took her hands in his. “First, try not to be so upset. Wherever Robbie is, he’s safe for the time being. And once you’ve talked to Bob, once you’ve explained that it’s going to take five days to get the money, we’ll have until Friday.”

  “Until Friday...to do what?”

  “Well, I think we should try to figure out where Robbie is and get him back ourselves, before it comes down to having to hand over the money.”

  Ali sat fighting the sense that Logan was suggesting the impossible. There were millions of people in the city of Toronto. How could they hope to find one little boy? Especially when Wes Penna hadn’t believed that even the police could manage it.

  She didn’t voice her doubts, though. She damn well wasn’t going to give up before they’d begun, even if their odds on success were awfully low. And she wasn’t going to let herself collapse into tears, either, even though not doing that was taking more willpower than she’d known she possessed.

  “How do you think we should start?” she asked at last.

  “Well, after you’ve talked to Robbie and Bob in the morning, and called that brokerage firm, I think we should pay Vinny Velarde a visit.”

  She shook her head in frustration. “If we talk to Vinny and Bob finds out...he said not to tell anyone I’d heard from him, remember?”

  “Ali, I just don’t think we’d be smart to do nothing. And if you’re right about Vinny, if he’s the only one who could be in on this with Bob, I’m sure he already knows you’ve heard from him.”

  “But if he is the one, he’d tell Bob everything I say and—”

  “Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t. You don’t know for sure how things stand between the two of them. And even if Bob does find out, there’s not a lot he can do. As long as you’ve still got the money, he’s not holding all the aces. And we have to keep the up-side in mind. Vinny probably knows where Bob is. Maybe even where Robbie is.”

  “Do you really think so?” The possibility gave her a tiny glimmer of optimism.

  “I think, at minimum, he’ll know how to get in touch with Bob, and that’s a start.”

  “But how do we make him tell us?”

  Logan hesitated, finally saying, “Let’s sleep on that one. It’s been a beast of a night, so let’s just get some sleep and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  “That’s probably a good idea.” Not that she expected to get even a minute’s sleep, but at least they had the beginnings of a plan now, and that made things seem a little less impossible. Instead of lying awake worrying, she could spend the night thinking of a way to make Vinny tell them what he knew.

  “Well, I guess I’ll take Cody up to bed,” Logan said. “You’re going to be okay?”

  She nodded again. “You go ahead. I’ll turn off the lights down here.”

  Logan glanced over at his son, then back at her. “We’re going to get Robbie home safely,” he said quietly. “I promise we are.” He leaned closer, brushed her cheek with a kiss, then murmured, “Night.”

  “Night,” she whispered.

  Watching him walk over to the love seat and pick up Cody made her throat ache. When Cody snuggled into his father’s chest, she blinked back tears.

  She was certain no one had carried Robbie to bed tonight. Certain no one had tucked him in. And as hard as she’d been trying not to dwell on how frightening this had to be for him, right now she couldn’t think about anything else.

  When Logan reached the doorway he looked back and smiled at her. She managed to keep her tears from escaping until he’d turned away again, but then they began to flow.

  If only, long ago, she’d met a man like Logan, instead of Bob, this nightmare wouldn’t be happening. If only Robbie had a father like Logan, instead of Bob, he’d be asleep in his own bed tonight.

  Chapter Five

  “Shh, everything’s going to be all right,” Ali murmured to Cody. He had the same scrubbed-fresh little-boy smell that Robbie had in the mornings, and it was enough to make her heart ache.

  It was hardly Cody’s fault, though, that he wasn’t Robbie, so she cuddled him more closely on her lap. Her kitchen chairs might not have been designed for this sor
t of thing, but when he’d started crying halfway through his cornflakes they’d ended up here. He’d been in tears, off and on, for the entire hour he’d been up—despite Logan’s attempt to paint an optimistic picture of Robbie being home soon.

  “Daddy, what if the bad man comes back and takes me, too?” he asked between sobs.

  “Cody, he’s not going to do that,” Logan said, pouring himself a glass of orange juice. “I promise he won’t.”

  “But what if he does? What if he comes when you leave me at school and he takes me?”

  Ali closed her eyes and tried to make her mind go blank, but she wasn’t able to. When Cody was this upset at the idea of somebody taking him, how must Robbie be feeling when somebody really had taken him? And what sort of scars would it leave?

  She told herself not to think about that. It would only make this experience even more emotionally draining. The time to worry about long-term problems was after Robbie was safely home. Then they’d be able to deal with whatever the aftereffects were.

  She looked over at Logan again. He was still trying to reassure Cody, but Cody wasn’t buying it at all.

  “Daddy, I don’t want to go to school today,” he whined. “I want to stay with you.”

  “Son, I’m afraid you can’t. I...” He stopped speaking when Cody began crying again and buried his face against Ali.

  Logan glanced across the table at her in obvious frustration.

  She gave him a look that said she thought he should give in. She didn’t know what they’d do with Cody when they went to see Vinny, but he was getting more and more upset, and he’d survive missing a day of grade one.

  “Look, son,” Logan said after a minute, “you can’t stay with me because I’m not going to be home today. But how about this? What if, instead of school, I take you up to spend the day with Grandma and Grandpa? Would that be a good idea?”

  Cody nodded without moving his face from Ali’s shoulder.

  “Okay, then you stop crying and I’ll phone them right now.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. “It’s barely seven,” he muttered to Ali. “Odds are, I’ll wake them.”

  Absently thinking that Logan’s parents couldn’t be the early risers he and Cody were, she watched him dial. Then she half listened to his side of the conversation. The call, she gathered, had woken them. After he’d apologized to his mother for that he didn’t say much, but he chose the words he did use carefully, letting her know there was a lot he was leaving out.

  “Thanks a million,” he finally told her. “I’ll explain more when I get there.”

  He hung up and ruffled his son’s hair. “Okay, let’s go, sport. You run upstairs and wash your face again and we’ll be on our way.”

  As Cody slid off Ali’s lap, Logan glanced at his watch, saying, “I can easily make it back before nine.”

  She nodded, but his parents lived up in suburban Don Mills, and if the morning rush hour was bad...

  He had to make it back before Robbie phoned, though, because she was really going to need his emotional support. How on earth was she going to reassure Robbie that everything would be fine when she was terrified it wouldn’t? She was still worrying about that five minutes later, when Logan and Cody left. Once they were gone, she wandered aimlessly through the empty house, fighting to maintain what little control she still had over her emotions.

  The oppressive silence didn’t help. Normally, at this time on a Monday morning, Robbie would be noisily getting ready to leave for school—shouting to her about the boot or mitt that gremlins must have stolen during the night. Today, the house was as quiet as a tomb.

  Tomb. She shook her head, knowing she was well on the way to worrying herself into a nervous breakdown. And she wasn’t going to be any help to Robbie if she fell apart, so she couldn’t let that happen. Somehow, she had to cope until he was safely home. She made a fresh pot of coffee, then poured herself some and sat down in the living room, pretending that she was actually relaxing.

  Finally, at eight-twenty, she gave up the pretense and went over to the front window to watch for Logan. It was fully light outside now—a bright sun-shiny day that made the snow dazzle. Looking out at a morning like this would normally make her smile. Today, she knew nothing would make her smile. Not even Santa’s sleigh, complete with every last reindeer, sitting on a lawn across the street.

  Robbie had made a ritual of saying good morning to each of them through the window, and when she closed her eyes she could almost hear him rhyming off their names—saving Rudolph for last, because he liked him best. She swallowed over the lump in her throat and stared straight at the road, trying not to notice anything else.

  When Logan hadn’t appeared by eight-thirty she decided he’d gotten stuck in traffic. By eight-forty, she’d begun to visualize him inching his way down the Don Valley Parkway—commonly referred to by locals as the Don Valley parking lot. Then she looked back out and saw that he was actually pulling into her driveway. That caused her anxiety level to inch down a little. At least she was no longer alone.

  Not wanting him to realize she’d just been standing waiting for him, she headed to the kitchen to fix him a coffee, putting it on the table just as he strode into the room.

  “How’s Cody?” she asked by way of greeting.

  “He was fine by the time I left. My parents spoil him rotten, so he loves being with them. But what about you? You still hanging in okay?”

  She nodded, glancing at what he was carrying—a screwdriver and a flat plastic thing the shape of a TV remote. It was three times larger, though, and had two long, plastic-coated wires protruding from one end and what looked like a telephone jack coming out of the other.

  “My father’s into electronic gadgets,” he explained, setting it on the table. “Or battery-operated gadgets in this case.”

  “And this gadget is...?”

  “A special recorder for phone conversations. I’m just going to replace your answering machine with it until after we’ve taped the calls, okay?”

  When she nodded again, he unplugged the jack on her machine.

  “See all these playback controls?” he added, pointing to the row of dials. “You can do amazing things with what you tape—focus in on something and magnify it, enhance background sounds. It’s way more sophisticated than we need, but I wanted to be able to replay the calls. If we’re lucky, there’ll be something useful on them.”

  “Like...?”

  “Who knows. Bob might let something slip. Or there could be background noise that would give us a clue. Even Robbie might say something that would help.”

  She watched as he moved the phone over to the table, then turned it upside down and started unscrewing screws. “This won’t take long, will it?” she asked nervously. “It isn’t that much before nine.”

  “I’ll just be another minute.” He pulled the bottom panel off the phone. “All I have to do is bridge this connection with the wires and we’ll be able to plug the recorder in and out as easily as your machine...but what the hell is this?”

  Ali stared at the exposed insides, seeing nothing that didn’t look like she assumed it should. Logan, though, was removing a little silver thing. It reminded her of the tiny disk battery in her calculator.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  He held the disk out in the palm of his hand. “This is a remote listening device. A transmitter. Somebody’s had your phone bugged.”

  * * *

  LOGAN HAD TURNED around the chair across the table from Ali’s so he could straddle it, and they both sat watching the phone as the time drew closer and closer to nine.

  Ali’s gaze kept straying, though, to the little listening device that Logan had removed and left sitting on the table. She’d always thought phones were bugged by doing something with their wires in the basement or wherever, but that particular technology had apparently marched on without her knowledge. According to Logan, the little disk inside her phone was a transmitter that had
enabled someone to listen in on her calls.

  Or more likely, he’d said, to record them from a distance. That way, nobody had to spend time listening in. They could just check the tape every so often. The question was who, and the answer might well be Bob. And if it had been him, that shot to hell her theory that somebody must be in on this with him. He could have found out whatever he wanted to know just by taping her calls.

  “It’s nine o’clock,” she finally murmured, checking her watch for at least the hundredth time that morning. “Bob told me before nine.”

  “Relax,” Logan said. He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Just relax, it’s going to ring any second.”

  He was right. It rang almost immediately—the sound momentarily paralyzing her.

  Then Logan muttered, “Dammit,” and she glanced at him.

  Her gaze followed his back to the phone. The caller ID panel was flashing Unknown, just as it had last night, and she realized Logan had been holding out the same faint hope she had—that whoever Robbie was with wouldn’t think to use a cell phone.

  But he had, of course. Or, more likely, Bob had made a point of telling him to.

  Heart pounding, hand trembling, she picked up the receiver.

  “Mommy?” Robbie’s thin little voice came across the line before she could say a word.

  “Yes, darling, I’m here.” She was flooded with relief at hearing him, but filled with anxiety by how frightened he sounded. Where was he? Who was he with? Was he all right?

  Bob had told her no questions, but surely she could ask if he was all right.

  “I’m okay,” he told her when she did. “But, Mommy, they said I had to stay here a few days and I don’t want to. Mommy...”

  His voice broke, and hearing that almost broke her heart.

  “Mommy...I watched all of ‘Barney and Friends.’ Right to the end. So I must be late for school already. So can you come get me right now?”

  “Robbie, I’m going to come and get you just the minute I can. But it probably won’t be today. You can phone me again tomorrow morning, though, and—”